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Originally Posted by Andrew
...if you allow 3 days prior to competition for additional fabrication and you require a team to check their parts in at the competition, the inspector would have a pretty good idea of what was realistic to fab and what wasn't in those three days.
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Considering the disparity amoung teams and their resources, how could an inspector determine what is "realistic" for each team. Some teams have 100 people involved, some less than 10; some teams have more/better funding and could afford to "buy" 3 days of machine shop time in 7 different shops. I think that forcing the inspectors to try to determine what teams are capable of designing/building in 3 days is going to do nothing but create problems... not just problems, but big, ugly
inconsistancies. (This is generally a bad thing for soo many reasons that I hope that I need not go into it...)
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... If you don't get everything done, you run against a hard limit; you're getting in a van or on an airplane.
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So teams that have and attend a local competition (little or no travel time) have an advantage? What about those teams (the #s seems to increase every year) that compete in back to back competitions, competitions that are nowhere near each other? do they just lose out?
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As long as there is a rule that the super-majority of people understand and follow, the playing field will be level.
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Not quite...A completely level playing field will never happen. It can only really be done by limiting innovation and creativity; putting a "freeze" on the good teams and let everyone else catchup... What the goal
should be...Raise the low end of the field, so that any team can get a robot of some form moving and participating... something that is seems that FIRST is trying to do (the drill motor kits and related items)
I
do like the idea of fabricating true,identical "spare" parts (with components broken down into basic mechanisms, not necessarily individual pieces) any time after ship. I know that there are still problems with that method as well though...
-Bill